IT’S FRIDAAAAAAAY! YAAAY!!! Congrats for surviving the week :) I’m happy to say Back on Track week was a success! I ate most of my meals at home and got back into my usual workout routine; as a result I felt more like normal. I still went out twice this week but that’s normal life and I enjoyed it!

Last night I went back and read my first blog post after reading Heather’s blog about her first post. It was interesting to look back at that post because it was about learning to run and I just ran my first 5k race! Kind of cool timing when you think about it!

Continuing the recap theme I wanted to break down my 5k pace for you guys since I had a couple of questions about it. My official race time is 38:34 and according to my Nike+ I ran 5.03kms with an average pace of 7:40/km.

As you can see I had a slow start for a few reasons, it was a mass start so it was very crowded and I wanted to cross the starting line with my bestie J who was (speed) walking the race. It was also FREEZING and we were starting cold so a nice, slow, jog was definitely needed. And I can’t forget that my capris were tucked so far into my knee socks that they were being pulled down, woops! Anyway…

My plan was to run/walk taking brisk and short walking breaks. The first 3 run segments had the following average speed: 5:36/km, 6:16/km, 5:42/km.

You can after my third run I didn’t slow down as much during the walking break because I wanted to run negative splits like I do on training runs. At this point I also had a great (for me) time going and I was pumped to keep going strong.

Unfortunately this is also when my hip pain flared up and you can see the spectacular nose dive my pace takes. The Nike+ doesn’t say how slow I got but it was slower than 9:37 and I lost a lot of time here. Since I was coming into the race on the heels of an injury my main goal was to finish without hurting myself, so slowing down sucked but was necessary.

I still managed to sprint to the finish with a 4:77/km pace! And there you have my run break down!